The Contributors' Column

MUCH nonsense has been written about that mystery we call genius. The common notion of it as a wild and irresponsible frenzy of the spirit, hardly to be distinguished from demoniacal possession, has been elaborated with statistics, genealogical tables, footnotes, and other marks of meticulous research. Curiously enough, genius itself has seldom collaborated in these studies, the possessors of it being content, for the most part, to employ it upon its own chosen ends; so that much of what we think we know about its secret processes has come to us at second or third hand. Edith Wharton can offer direct testimony (‘Confessions of a Novelist ). The reader will naturally note a surface resemblance between the popular notion of it and the real t hing here laid bare. He will also observe a fundamental difference. The artist is not a mere passive instrument, automatically registering a spontaneous uprush of thought and emotion. Though the spirit may work in this fashion, its wonders to perform, that is only half of the mystery. Like the Moon, genius has two faces, and Mrs. Wharton turns both of them to the light. The second, usually obscured in the literature of the subject, she reveals as the creative mind itself—an active, willing, conscious agent, co-partner of inspiration in its own right.

Lawrence Sullivan (‘ The Veteran Racket’ ) is a newspaperman of long and varied experience. For some years he represented the Associated Press in Chicago and Washington, and is now on the staff of the Washinton Post. However startling his assertions, they have been checked and reehccked by the Atlantic, and are offered in evidence with complete confidence. ▵ To refute in advance any allegation of kinship with Pontius Pilate, Don Know lton asks a question about ' Truth in Advertising’ and waits for an answer — his own. As t lie poet Omar so pointedly remarked, ’He knows about it all; He knows!’ — he is engaged in bank advertising in Cleveland. ▵ For three and a half decades, Frank R. Kent (‘Our Political Monstrosities’) has been identified with the Baltimore Sun, advancing from reporter to managing editor and vice president. Always a shrewd student of public affairs, he has seen many a political freak

One new figure in this colorful procession that marches from oblivion to oblivion does not seriously alarm him. ▵ As every syllable of his name proclaims, Wendell brooks Phillips (‘Students in a Hick College’) comes of New England ancestry, but lias Jived most of his life in Georgia. He grew up, he says, with Piedmont College, from which he graduated in 1913, and then went to Harvard —only to return again to his lirsl love, which he serves devotedly as Prolessor of English. ▵ ' If witches can ride brooms,’ said Rose Elizabeth Reiss to herself, ‘why cannot I, a housewife and mother of two children, ride a pen:1 So saying, she mounted her hobbyhorse, pul the spurs of ambit ion to him, and dashed off at full gallop. ’Salt of the Earth’ is the trophy she brought back from her firsl run. ▵ Three Marriages’ is another chapter from the exotic life of Nora Wain, an American-born Quaker who lived for some years as an adopted daughter in the household of a wealthy Chinese family. Early in April the Atlaritic Monthly Press will publish her complete story in hook form, under the title, The House of Exile. A Poet and dramatist, Laurence Binyon (‘In Hospital’ ) has just resigned from the Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. In September he will come to Mnerica as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, to succeed T. S. Eliot.

Earnest Elmo Calkins (' The Lost Art of Play’) is one business man who, throughout a long and successful career, has never allowed the day’s work to dwarf his sense of proport ion. When, in 1931, he retired from the presidency of the Calkins & Holden Advertising Agency in New York, he was not for a moment at loose ends for something with which to occupy himself. He had long since discovered that life is like a mediæval city, full of picturesque sidealleys and byways, and with unflagging enthusiasm he turned to explore them. ▵ To literary criticism Herbert Read (‘Retrospect’) has brought the lofty imagination of a poet, to poetry the disciplined intelligence of a critic. He holds the Watson Gordon Professorship of Fine Art in the University of Edinburgh. Freda C. Bond (‘Thoughts Revealed’ ) is a British poet whose work has appeared frequently in these pages. ▵ Retired to a landlubberly existence in a California hamlet, Bill Adams (‘Good Old Stormy’) can still feel the sting of spray in his face and taste the salt upon his lips when he gets out his battered typewriter and spins a yarn about the days when sailors were really sailors and ships had not yet became floating steam engines. M. R. Werner (‘ Radio City ') is the author of half a dozen books, ineluding Barnurn (1923) and Tammany Hall (1923). A Educated at Smith, Columbia, Radelille, and at London University, Mina Curtiss (‘Foxglove’) is Assistant, Prolessor of English at Smith College. She is the daughter of the well-known Boston merchant. Louis E. hirsfein. Stanley lasson (‘ Silver Magpies’) is a don at New College, Oxford, and an authority on are!urology, particularly the antiquities of Byzantium. ▵ Although the lnsull holding companies were (breed into receivership a year ago, in April 1932, riot until now has it been possible to untangle the intricate web of their affairs sufficiently to reveal the circumstances and causes of their downfall. N. R. Danielian (‘From lnsull to Injury ) has recently completed for the Mouse Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce an intensive investigation of holding-company practices. The recipient of three degrees from Harvard, he is an instructor and tutor in economics at that university.

The tooth of an old sea dog.

Dear Atlantic, —
1t Look me a devil of a time to get ‘Old Stormy’ rigged out in his shore-going clothes, I am glad you like him.
There is one thing that troubles me about that tale. I fear that landsmen readers will think I exaggerate in the matter of our grub. To-day it seems inconceivable that such food could have been served to human beings, but so it was. I still hacee a tooth in my head which I cracked one night when I tried to bite into a fresh pantile. My ship was at anchor in the Scheldt, and was to sail at dawn. There was no time to see a dentist. So I took little wads of tar from between the deck planks, working it up until it was soft enough to use as a filling, and kept the tooth plugged with the stuff all the way out to Frisco. It never troubled me.
I will say this for pantiles: they were nourishing, in their way. What they were made of I never knew for sure. It was said to be pea meal and horse meat. They are no longer made now. Seafaring men of to-day live luxurious lives.
Pant iles came by their name in Iquique. Some workmen in that port were putting a new tile roof on a building near the water, and. when almost done with the job, they found that they lacked a few tiles. A sailor aboard a ship near by saw I heir dilemma and took them some ship biscuits. The biseuits were nailed into place — and there you are. For aught I know, the pantiles are still on that roof, for it never rains in Iquique,
I cannot vouch for the truth of this tale, hut I’m willing to believe il. So would you be if you had eaten a Liverpool pantile.
Roll and go, shipmates! It lakes, wild weal her to make good sailors!
RILL ADAMS
Dutch Flat. California
P.S. When a square-rigger man came in from a long passage, his order to the gaping waitress was invariably, ‘Hum and eggs For three on one plate, lady.’

For the faint of heart.

To Mrs. E. T. vom Baur, of Arlington, Massachusetts, we. are indebted for the following paraphrases written by her lather, John T. Trowbridge. They strike a note which all of us wish might resound through the land.

A TEXT FROM GOETHE

’Muth verloren, allen verloren.'

FROM VIRGIL

‘ Tu ne cede mails.'

De seneetute.

From age and youth alike, Miss Vida D. Scudder has gathered a pretty nosegay of congratulations for her paper, ‘The Privilege of Age.’ From Mr. William Farrabee Calkins, of Freeport, Illinois, come these line’s written in honor of his father’s seventieth birthday: —

The death of Edward Row land Sill.

Dear Atlantic, —
During a visit to Hartford quite fifty-two years ago, I spent an interesting evening at a Shakespeare club where I met Charles Dudley Warner. Being told that I was a Californian, he asked me many questions about Mr. Sill, whom he spoke of with great enthusiasm, deploring his burying himself in ‘a little Western town. Then he said, ‘Will you give him a message from me? Tell him to come Fast among his peers.
Thai message I carried. — to my sorrow,— although for the moment it gave Mr. Sill great pleasure. Acting upon the invitation, he left very shortly for the Fast; hearing of the very serious illness of Mrs. Sill’s father, who was his uncle, he stopped off in the Middle West, and, in helping to nurse him, lost his own lile.
GERTRUDE S. EELLS
Carmel, California

‘Pinky Blue’ and ‘Gordy.’

Dear Atlantic, —
As I read ‘The Banishment of Pinky Blue’ in your December number 1 was carried back to my own solitary childhood, nearly forty years ago.
I was surprised to find that Pinky Blue was a doll, although not a wooden one like mine of similar name. In those days there was a shop in our town where baby and doll carriages were manufactured, with a side line of jointed dolls made entirely of wood. I had two of these in my large doll family, named Pinky and Bluey respectively. After much hard usage these dolls lost some of their members, so that finally the best parts of each were assembled to form one doll, which thereafter bore the hyphenated name, Pinky-Bluey, Recently she was heralded as an antique and exhibited at a doll show.
The story of the imaginative little girl with her make-believe friend also struck in me another responsive, chord. I can well remember opening our front door and greeting my other self with the words, ‘Good morning, Gordy,’ and ushering her in to play with me. I had been taught that God was ever present and all around me. ‘Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feel.’ I wonder if the name ‘Gordy’ was an affectionate corruption of the word ‘God,’and if the little playfellow was the Spirit personified?
ROSE THOMPSON JENKINS
Johnson, Vermont

We are amused.

Dear Atlantie. —
I pass along this true story in the belief that it will give a bit of fun to your staff.
One day last spring a friend of mine was sitting on the verandah of a hotel in Palm Beach when along came a smartly dressed young girl who carried a copy of the Atlantic under her arm. She seated herself near my friend, and the two fell into a casual conversation. My friend noted the magazine and said. ‘I see you have the last number of the Atlantic; how did you like the article on&emdah;?’
‘Oh my goodness!’exclaimed the girl. ’I don I read it. I just carry it for prestige.
JULIA FLORENCE ALEXANDER
Fort Wayne, Indiana

Missouri miracle.

Dear Atlantic, —
I read with great interest the beautiful article, ‘Three Days to See,’ by Helen Keller in the January issue.
Years ago when my home was in Missouri, we numbered among our most intimate friends a family in which the old grandfather had been totally blind for many years. One day as he sat on the verandah, his granddaughter on the step below him, he suddenly said. ’Belle, you have freckles.’ The child ran into the house, crying out. ‘Mother, Mother. Grand father can see! His daughter hastened to him and knelt beside him, and once more he saw her face.
The precious boon of sight was granted to him, not for three days, but for one short half hour. Then the black curtain fell forever. Mark Twain used this incident in an article published in the old Galaxy.
A. W.
New York City